PRIVATE DOMAIN

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PARIS JOURNAL about apartment hunting in Paris and about a government scandal involving government-owned apartments. Tells about a scandal involving the new French Prime Minister, Alain Juppe. He has been Prime Minister for just under 6 months. He is a long-fingered, elegant man of fifty, with the kind of enviable, aerodynamic baldness that in America only tycoons seem able to carry off. At the beginning of June, the weekly comic paper Le Canard Enchaine revealed that Juppe, when he was the financial adjoint to Chirac, had taken the lease on an apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement which belonged to the domains prive of the City of Paris. The domaine prive is a peculiarly Parisian establishment, although, even after four months of scandal, no one knows exactly what it is, how the City of Paris came to possess it, or how you get into it. It turns out that the City of Paris owns a small, semisecret group of apartments and apartment buildings that are given out at the discretion of whoever happens to be running Paris. Tells about writer's own apartment hunt. Juppe probably would have survived the revelation of his living arrangements if only Le Canard Enchaine hadn't published, a couple of Wednesdays later, the news that when Juppe was a city official he had taken apartments in the domaine prive for his son and daughter as well, and that these apartments, too, were right there on Rue Jacob. He was evicted by a magistrate from the apartment. After brooding on the affair, the French elite has decided that the cure for the kinds of hidden deals that fill French public life is transparence, which has become (along with exclusion) the word of the moment. By transparence people just mean that everybody should see everything that is going on. A Paris you can see right through hardly seems worth having.